Garage Woes

Well it’s getting to the time of year when the rally season starts for me, so I had better get my finger out and start going through the little fiesta in preparation for the first event in March, the White Heather run by Wigton Motor Club.

So during the winter months since the last event I have been mulling over how to make the car go faster and what jobs need doing before the first event of 2018. I have been looking at the power to weight ration of the Fiesta and looking to see where I can lose a few kilograms of weight from the car. I have found a source of carbon fibre bonnets, Perspex windows, fiberglass front wings and then generally stripping as much surplus weight and unnecessary gear out of the car. I then started to tot up the bill for all the light weight parts and stupidly left the sizeable estimate out on my desk. Where, the good lady of the house found it, and pointed out that she could make the car far lighter than what I was considering, and actually save me money. Mystified how SHE knew better than me I asked her to prove it. “Simple” she said “I will put you on a diet, I can get a good few stones of weight out of the car by making you lose weight, this will also mean we spend less money on food, therefore saving money every week”.

Damn, I should have been more careful where I leave bits of paper laying around as I now can look forward to a lot of green lettuce. We will see if she can get more weight out of the car by the end of the year than I could by replacing heavy metal and glass parts.

So what to do first; perhaps get the underside of the car clean and repainted to protect it from any more gravel rash. Try and make the body paint a bit shinier by polishing it. I also need to get the tyre with a nail sticking out of it fixed as the tread is still relatively new and should do a few more events this season. Check and service the engine and make sure the gear box is full of oil as the nearside driveshaft oil seal needs changing and does leak a little. That gear box seal is another job that should have been done earlier this year but as it needs the offside driveshaft to be removed and a steel bar inserted through the diff to knock the nearside driveshaft out, this has been a job that I have been putting off. If anybody knows of a better easier way of removing the nearside driveshaft from a mk1 fiesta please let me know.

I also agreed to recommission a friend’s Triumph Spitfire that has been off the road for a number of years, I was meant to do it whilst he was

working out of the country as he is planning to use the car as his everyday car when he gets back into the country in the next few months. I had best enlist the help of my retired Dad and get the Spitfire down to his garage so that we can get it onto his 4 post ramp, if I leave it there long enough he will probable do the recommissioning just to get it out of his way.

Anyway enough from me for now, I am off to hide the lettuce from the Wife. I will provide another report to bore you all with next month.